my fave bit of tech has to be my Psion 5MX. It's 11 years old. and still feels fairly relevant and IMO still has no worthy sucessor, although the N900 may come closst for a long time.

It is a great compact design with an ace keyboard, and good sized screen. Runs for ages on a couple of AA duracells. The software on board was fantastic. The calendar still has no rivals, and still syncs with Outlook 2007. Hardly use it these days as the case is fragile, but recently showed it to a couple of geeky twentysomethings who had not seen one before and they were amazed by it. Also the DNA of both symbian and maemo can be traced back to it.

Other than that, it would have to be the internet tablet and mythtv for me.

i'd also say its my wii.

its the first console i dared hacking and modding and now its my nearly wireless mediacenter that i use to load to games, music and videos directly off my computer hard drive.

I am not truly ever 100% satisfied with any of my gadgets... But my router Asus WL500g was truly more than I expected, with the custom firmware. It could hook up to a USB sound card and stream audio, to mention one thing.

Also, I like my Logitech Harmony 525, which has given much for the price.

But nothing has really changed my life the way that the US Robotics Courier 14.400/19.200 modem did. My school buddy asked me if I wanted to take part of a group import of a batch of modems directly from Canada, to save some money. I asked what a modem was, and he explained that it was a modulator slash demodulator. It could be used to dial up other computers on bulletin board systems.

Caught up in his enthusiasm, I got one, and he also told me about the internet, gave me a 1 month free (except standard minute rates) subscription to EUNET/internet that never actually stopped working for the three or so years I had it.

Internet totally changed my life.

I have to agree on the UMPC concept but I would pick my OQO 02 - not as fast as some of the Sony UX series but not as fat either. It will fit easily into my front pants pocket.

WOW is good. And to my mind, no phone since the original iPhone has had it. The best the N900 can hope for is the lesser GEE effect.

The OQO vs. the Sony:

Personally, The N900 made me say WooOooW
And thats coming from someone who owned (and sold) the 2G-3G-3GS iphones

Considering the OQO i considered that UMPC before the Sony, But the inferior CPU held me off getting it...That time I FELT THE NEED FOR SPEED!!!

Also, I cant seem to see your picture its not showing?!

oh Kathy you naughty! PM me!

maybe something to laugh about now but I must say the Amiga 1200.
somewhat portable, sexy and extremely powerfull for it´s time.
I used to make music on it till 2001. then Renoise took over on the windows machines.

Great thread.

This little baby from IguanaWorks makes all of my IR dreams come true. Combined with an OpenWRT router it's pure magic. I use one on an ASUS WL-500W and on a Linksys WRTSL54GS. Both of which are also great gadgets. I too hook up a USB sound card to my ASUS for both streaming and local playback via mpd. That ASUS can be had for $50 at newegg.

USB is my favorite technology to date, it allows even my most simplist gadgets to fornicate and reproduce beautiful music together.

I have a somewhat similar story, but for me it was from Amiga 500 to FastTracker II.

I thought among all these geeks no-one had spotted it.